#16: Project Somnacin
This week: Artist Aureia Harvey and Digital Loss // The Tyranny of the Algorithm // Next Wave Transparent Screens. Plus, this week's hottest job and your exclusive offer for Remix Summit London
Welcome to issue 16 of “Creative R&D”.
This week we look at a digital artist whose work is increasingly lost, a victim of early-stage technology development.
Then, a key essay on the internet’s impact, and why it misreads history.
Last up, a new wave of screen tech, and what it might mean for tomorrow’s design and architecture.
Let’s dive in. 🔥
Pre-History // Aureia Harvey and Digital Loss
I was excited to see the announcement of the first major retrospective of early digital art pioneer Aureia Harvey at New York’s Museum of the Moving Image.
Harvey is only 53 but has been one of the key names in digital art for nearly three decades - an explorer of the expressive possibilities of websites, computer games, 3d printing and other digital-created mediums as channels for creativity.
I wrote about Pussy Riot a few weeks ago, and the way their art came from capturing the present-tense of their protest on digital video.
Thinking about Harvey this week, I realised the critical point I missed in writing about them.
Pussy Riot’s art is the art of digital video, shared on social media. But underlying that art is a stable technology - digital video files in a standardised format and the different digital video and audio editing packages and encoders which sit behind it.
Harvey’s art is more unstable. Like many other artists working in early stage technologies - true pioneers of Creative R&D - who have explored emerging media, whether websites, 3D printing or more - working before their technical standards and formats have been fully established has left them highly prone to destruction
Go to the CV page of her website with longterm life and creative partner Michael Samyn and click around the links to projects.
There are wonders here.
Try the Viriditas Chapel, a VR experience inspired by Hildegard Von Bingen.
Or watch this video of computer game Fatale, inspired by Oscar Wilde’s Salome.
They are brilliant, rich in texture and adding new perspectives to artistic history.
But the real experience of Harvey’s work is one of loss.
Games like Luxuria Superba and The Path are just about accessible. A few formats work, if you download old browsers or operating systems.
But so many others are vanishing or disappeared beneath the digital waves. And with them an era of early digital art.
Projects like B-O-X that depend on Flash are gone. Eden Garden, commissioned in 2001 by SF Moma, gone. Gone because the tech doesn’t exist any more to run it.
That makes a project like Skinonskinonskin exciting, as it clings on.
Billed as a “DHTML love letter”, it’s a series of romantic, sometimes erotic exchanges between Harvey and Samyn. Notes, interactive images and videos. It’s about connection during separation. Running on a Netscape emulator on digital art magazine Rhizome’s website, it is brilliant.
And so fragile.
It would have been beautiful during Covid, when we were all so far apart, and so digitally close.
The show at MOMI will bring Harvey fully back to the present and, hopefully, help her be fully recognised as a the critical artist she is. I’ve written before about how I think we’re seeing all the many sub-genres of digital art merge into a single category - and this gives an amazing opportunity for artists like Harvey, who have mined very specific niches, to find a generic home.
But despite that, the destruction of her work will continue.
Preserving digital work is hard. Expensive. Technically complicated. And largely unfunded. And preserving early technical experiment is even harder.
Come back to Harvey’s CV next year and more links won’t work than do now. The churn of progress won’t wait for these important but utterly technology dependant works to be saved.
I wonder how we’ll think about early digital artists in 100 or 1000 years time? Will we care about them at all, when none of their work will be present?
I hope we will. There’s a comparison with the huge amount of lost early Ancient Greek poetry and plays I take comfort from. In the codex of early Greek poetry and thought, there are thousands of masterworks we can never reclaim, and a series of fragments that only hint at genius lost to time.
I hope on that basis that Harvey can be the Stesichorus of the 31st century. Stesichorus is a poet, a few fragments of whose Geryoneis remain, telling the story of one of the labours of Hercules.
That fragment was enough to inspire the outstanding Autobiography of Red, an epic poem by Anne Carson which is one of major works of literature of the late twentieth century. Go read it. No, don’t wait, go NOW!
We won’t get back the early websites, net art and DHTML storytelling that has been and gone. Much of what started the internet is gone for good.
But if a few fragments can be preserved, the way the brilliant Skinonskinonskin is being kept alive, they can remain a source for tomorrow’s creative inspiration, and a part of our shared artistic history.
If you’re in New York, go see the show. Harvey matters.
Exclusive Reader Offer // Remix Summits London
We’re fast closing in on this month’s Remix Summit London, and there’s still time to get your exclusive discount on tickets..
This year’s theme is ‘Ideas for the Revolution’ on the 30-31 January 2024 at the Royal Academy of Arts & Here East and “Creative R&D” Readers are being given a very special 25% discount on tickets. Just enter CREATRD when you check out at www.remixsummits.com/ldn-2024/.
I’m excited to be in conversation with gaming legend Miles Jacobson OBE, Studio Director of Sports Interactive (creators of the global sensation Football Manager) on the future of gaming.
See you there!
Critical Reading // The Tyranny of the Algorithm
Your recommended read for this week is this essay by Kyle Chayka in The Guardian.
Chayka writes for The New Yorker and others, and has been a key voice worrying at the impact of the internet on the world for the last decade. Put him alongside David Carr as have well qualified thoughts that the outcome of the internet has been a world that is stupider and more boring.
It’s Chayka who, nearly 10 years ago, first pointed out how increasingly all cafes look the same, shared ideas of design spreading everywhere, and neutralising the potency of the ideas which spawned them.
Close your eyes and think about the phrase “hipster coffee shop” and you’ll get what I mean. Dude with beard? Check. Wooden worktops? Check. A sign about some obscure, ethically sourced bean? Industrial lighting? Check, check.
It’s a good piece, and you’ll recognise much of the world he describes.
But I think he’s wrong in his basic assumption that we’re seeing the outcomes of the digital world.
My sense, and I’ve tried to talk about this elsewhere in this newsletter is that we’re at a beginning point not an end.
The internet and digital as we’ve understood and experienced it so far are just a start for what digital culture, aesthetics and more will mean.
The search algorithms that have influenced universal cafe design are early examples of the algorithms we will live with for the century ahead. Those algorithms are evolving exponentially in the transition to AI - the aesthetic flatness they’ve led to is to me a symbol of their simplicity.
Aureia Harvey’s work is a brilliant example - her net art and game design, so much on the verge of disappearing, feels raw and primitive. We can look on some of it almost like rock art - with an ancientness that feels remote.
But we need to teach ourselves to see that “earlyness” in the other places where digital erupts into the real world - to see how rough-edged it is, not getting lost in its sophistication and see it is as a terminal point.
That’s tough to do, we’ve come so far, so fast.
But if the digital revolution is a successor to the industrial revolution, we’re just coming through the 1860s, and the real fun is yet to come.
JOB, JOB, JOB! // This week’s hottest role
This week’s best job is totally awesome.
The CoStar Foresight Lab is part of the wider CoStar network - a uniquely ambitious play for the future of the screen and performance sectors. The Lab is a collaboration between Goldsmiths, Edinburgh, the BFI and Loughborough University … and pretty much everyone to do with it reads this newsletter.
The Lab will produce research, insight and thinking about the future of media, and this new role of Programme Manager will be the person to bring all its different strands together.
Go apply, it will be 🔥🔥🔥🔥
I Can See Clearly Now // Transparent LED Screens
Last up this week, two initial consumer plays in the next generation of screen technology.
Transparent screens have been around for a while, but with pretty limited public adoption.
So when both LG and Samsung launch a series of new devices in this space, take it as a sign that this is a new category waiting to break.
I ❤️ the holographic feel, where you can choose opacity and let the images play out in a kind of lite augmented reality. I can’t really see it working beyond the demos unless shows are specifically produced for the format, but it’s got 🔥🔥🔥 sci-fi feels.
But more important in some ways is the sense that these screens are becoming architectural features.
That’s the direction of travel I think we’re seeing with video walls and more - the screen becoming a wall, and those walls making buildings into digital entities.
I think we are seeing a new possibility for architecture here, and a new paradigmatic shift.
Keep watching!
Last Up // Project Somnacin
Made it all the way to the end? Good, I ❤️ U the most. 😂
This week’s title comes from Inception, Christopher Nolan’s 2010 dream-invading thriller.
I ❤️❤️❤️ Nolan movies, Inception and Tenet, alongside Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void, are probably my favourite 21st century films. (Saying that I finally got to Oppenheimer this week and was disappointed).
Anyway, Project Somnacin is not actually IN Inception. It’s in the background world-building Nolan did for it. It’s the name for the military research project that created the dream machine at the centre of the film.
Check this video on that research.
I think Inception is a critical test for the idea I describe above about trying to see all the digital creativity we have now as an early manifestation of something still in its early phases.
Inception makes that really hard to do. When Ariadne starts folding up reality in some of the film’s central scenes, it just looks SOOOO GOOOD. So beautiful, and so much an example of what’s only possible now in the encounter of art and technology.
These are early days for the full potential of digital visualisation, but my god, we’ve created some genius already.
See you next week.